“I can't tell,” he confessed, with infinite sadness. “I reckon I'd know the place if I saw it. And I've forgotten everything before that, but it seems to me that I fell a great ways, and lay for years and years with an awful pain in my head. Then all at once my head got better and I opened my eyes—mebbe it was a dream—and there I and the dog were in a little camp 'way up a big gulch. I knew the place, but I felt kind o' weak and dizzy-like and 'lowed I'd make a cache o' all my stuff, and go down to Del Nort' and see a doctor. So I dug a hole beside a big rock that had a peculiar mark on it, and put into it most o' my grub and some papers, and a lot o' that yellow stuff—what d'ye call it?—and reckoned they'd be safe till I come back in three or four weeks. I can remember all about the cache and my camp there, and my leavin' it and climbin' down a devilish steep place, and there I stop and can't remember nothin' since.”
This was absolutely all that was left of the man's memory, and, though he was now quite sane, he had to be taught the names and uses of many of the commonest objects. Moreover, he seemed to grow weaker instead of stronger, and after a few days the physician announced that his patient's end was near. When the old fellow was told this he called Tom to his bedside, and said to him:
“Pardner, you've done the square thing by me, and I want you to have half the traps in that cache after I've passed in my checks, and give the other half to—to—oh, God! Now I can't remember!”
Then his face brightened again.
“Oh, the letters'll tell! Read the letters and give her half of it. I'll sign a paper if you'll write it.”
So a will was made, and the dying man made a mark before witness, in lieu of the signature he had lost the power to make, and the next day he died.
The miners generally believed the stranger's story of this cache to be a figment of his disordered imagination, and Tom himself might have yielded to this theory had not the physician assured him that there was a fair chance of its truth.
So Tom preserved the will, the quartz and the key, hoping that chance might sometime disclose the treasure trove if there were any; and a few days later he and young Cooper started a second time on their prospecting tour. This time they took a burro with them, and so were able to carry a small tent and outfit for a fortnight's trip.
By active marching they reached the lake that night, finding it slow work to get their unwilling donkey up the steep rocks at the fall, by a circuitous trail and aided by some actual lifting of the little beast. They researched the hut, but found nothing new. The dog, now fat and strong, and a devoted friend, accompanied them and betrayed most excitedly his recognition of the bivouac. Next morning they made their way up to the head of the lake, where the breadth of the gulch and the appearance of things confirmed Tom's previous surmise that this was originally the main channel of drainage.
If this were true they ought to get evidence of drift gold; and several days were spent in panning the gravels (nowhere, however, of great extent), with most encouraging results. A few miles above the lake they found the gulch forked into two ravines divided by a rocky spur. They chose the right-hand one and lost three days in fruitless exploration of its bed and walls. Shep (the dog was a collie and they had rechristened him) did not display anything like the joy he had shown in the advance up the main stream, and when they finally returned to the forks they could not but notice his renewed spirits. The dog was again all eagerness, and intensely delighted when on the following morning they started up the left-hand gulch.